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People who get lost in the wild follow strangely predictable paths

Lose your bearings in an unfamiliar landscape and fear shreds your navigational brain. But studies are now revealing the common mistakes lost people make, helping rescue teams to find them before it’s too late

ABOUT 30 years ago, Ed Cornell, a psychologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, took a call from the police officer leading a search for a 9-year-old boy. The boy had gone missing from a campsite some days earlier, and his footprints suggested he had headed in the direction of a swamp a few kilometres away. The officer had one question: how far do lost 9-year-olds tend to travel?

Cornell and his colleague Donald Heth had been studying wayfinding behaviour for several years, so they were the obvious people to ask. But when they started pondering it, they realised how little they knew – how little anyone knew – about lost children: how they behaved, the routes they took, the landmarks they used, how far they went. Cornell and Heth quickly reviewed relevant studies and told the officer as much as they could. “His response shamed us,” they wrote afterwards. “‘Well, that’s not much. Don’t worry, doc, we may get a psychic out here today.'”

The way people behave when they are lost has always been a mystery, and searches were for a long time essentially random. But over the past decades, Cornell and other experts have dissected the available data in an attempt to understand how adults and children behave when they lose their way. Their aim has been to bring science to bear on searches, combining behavioural studies, statistics and probability theory to increase the chances of finding people before it is too late. Although they have discovered that lost people behave in extraordinary and irrational ways, they have also found that such individuals share …